Plastic landmines detection enhancement in non-homogeneous environment

Abstract

Mine detection techniques require extremely high detection rates. In this paper, enhancement in a signal processing algorithm is applied in the ground penetrating radar (GPR) in an ongoing research. In GPR microwave signals penetrate into the ground until a buried object reflects them back and the reflected signals are processed in order to extract information about the target. The main purpose of this paper is to apply an algorithm that provides a solution to the main problem of GPR application, which is the strong reflections from non-homogeneous clutter and other reflections from underground rocks and other materials. In this work the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing is applied to enhance resolution and SAR matrix is formed as GPR moves to the next position, followed by adaptive reference subtraction. Afterwards, a sand surface removal, reference subtraction and transition detection are applied in order to emphasize the weak reflections from the buried plastic landmine only and remove other reflections. The results obtained show that the algorithm worked well in the presence of high noise and non-homogenous clutter environment.